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The first thing ever searched on Google was the name Gerhard Casper, a former Stanford president. As the story goes, in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin demoed Google for computer scientist John Hennessy. They searched Casper’s name on both AltaVista and Google. The former pulled up results for Casper the Friendly Ghost; the latter pulled up information on Gerhard Casper the person.
What made Google’s results different from AltaVista’s was its algorithm, PageRank, which organized results based on the amount of links between pages. In fact, the site’s original name, BackRub, was a reference to the backlinks it was using to rank results. If your site was linked to by other authoritative sites, it would place higher in the list than some random blog that no one was citing.
Google officially went online later in 1998. It quickly became so inseparable from both the way we use the internet and, eventually, culture itself, that we almost lack the language to describe what Google’s impact over the last 25 years has actually been. It’s like asking a fish to explain what the ocean is. And yet, all around us are signs that the era of “peak Google” is ending or, possibly, already over.
This year, The Verge is exploring how Google Search has reshaped the web into a place for robots — and how the emergence of AI threatens Google itself.
Read the rest of this article at: The Verge
John Alec Baker was not an ornithologist by profession. He had a regular English schoolboy’s grammar-school education, then won his bread at odd jobs and minor clerical positions in the Essex county town where he was born and raised (and where he would, at the age of 61, die). Despite having worked for some time at the Automobile Association, he never learned to drive a car, so when he travelled the quiet roads into the English countryside around Chelmsford to watch the birds, he walked or – despite his poor eyesight and increasingly debilitating rheumatoid arthritis – rode his bicycle.
In his free time, Baker watched and documented the habits of birds, with particular attention to one raptor that had, by the middle of the 20th century, become seriously endangered: the peregrine falcon. Afternoons in the woods, and evenings recording his observations in a diary – a decade of such labour bore Baker his small, luminous masterpiece The Peregrine (1967), now recognised as some of the greatest nature writing ever set to paper:
For 10 years, I spent all my winters searching for that restless brilliance, for the sudden passion and violence that peregrines flush from the sky. For 10 years I have been looking upward for that cloud-biting anchor shape, that crossbow flinging through the air.
Not money, nor fame, nor even the improvement in man’s estate that motivates the knowledge-gathering activity of the modern scientist: Baker’s effort was for the sake of something else entirely. He sought something splendid and beautiful, to be sure, but – in worldly terms – completely and utterly useless.
Scarcely a decade after the publication of The Peregrine and half the world away, two working-class California teenagers formed a band. Neither knew how to play any instruments – ‘they didn’t know bass guitars were different from regular ones,’ a historian reports; ‘they didn’t even know about tuning at all’ – but their moms thought it a better idea than aimlessly wandering the rough streets of San Pedro, so they thought they’d give it a try. A few months of rookie jamming generated clumsy Alice Cooper and Blue Öyster Cult covers, before an encounter with the Ramones and the Clash won them over to punk rock. They started writing songs and, a few drummers and band names later, they finally settled on calling themselves the Minutemen. Over the course of their brief but intense five-year existence, they would become one of the most beloved and inspiring punk bands in the United States.
Great art and thought have always been motivated by something other than mere moneymaking, even if moneymaking happened somewhere along the way
Punk rock, of course, doesn’t seem much like birdwatching. It’s a theatre for status-seeking and pretence: you start a band to strike it big, to get signed, get paid, get laid. But the Minutemen were indifferent to the glamour and the preening. Punk itself seemed to them like a thing worth participating in, and the most obvious means of participation was making music. ‘Sometimes you have to act out your dreams,’ said the bassist and singer Mike Watt, ‘because circumstances can get you crammed down. And instead of getting angry and jealous of what they got, why not get artistic about it and create a little work site, a little fiefdom?’ The activity – meeting other bands, ‘jamming econo’ (touring on the cheap), cutting records, acting out one’s dreams – was its own goal, and building a DIY punk rock world was a happy consequence. The meagre profits just kept the fiefdom running.
Read the rest of this article at: Psyche
If there’s one thing authors love more than procrastinating, it’s praising one another. During the Renaissance, Thomas More’s Utopia got a proto-blurb from Erasmus (“divine wit”), while Shakespeare’s First Folio got one from Ben Jonson (“The wonder of our stage!”). By the 18th century, the practice of selling a book based on some other author’s endorsement was so well established that Henry Fielding’s spoof novel Shamela even came with fake blurbs, including one from “John Puff Esq.”
Blurbs have always been controversial—too clichéd, too subject to cronyism—but lately, as review space shrinks and the noise level of the marketplace increases, the pursuit of ever more fawning praise from luminaries has become absurd. Even the most minor title now comes garlanded with quotes hailing it as the most important book since the Bible, while authors report getting so many requests that some are opting out of the practice altogether. Publishers have begun to despair of blurbs, too. “You only need to look at the jackets from the 1990s or 2000s to see that even most debut novelists didn’t have them, or had only one or two genuinely high-quality ones,” Mark Richards, the publisher of the independent Swift Press, told me. “But what happened was an arms race. People figured out that they helped, so more effort was put into getting them, until a point was reached where they didn’t necessarily make any positive difference; it’s just that not having them would likely ruin a book’s chances.”
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
Early in 2020, the architect Scott West got a call at his office, in Atlanta, from a prospective client who said that his name was Archie Lee. West designs luxurious houses in a spare, angular style one might call millionaire modern. Lee wanted one. That June, West found an appealing property in Buckhead—an upscale part of North Atlanta that attracts both old money and new—and told Lee it might be a good spot for them to build. Lee arranged for his wife to meet West there.
She arrived in a white Range Rover, wearing Gucci and Prada, and carrying a small dog in her purse. She said her name was Indiana. As she walked around the property, she FaceTimed her husband, then told West that it wasn’t quite what they had in mind, and that he should keep looking. West said that he’d need a retainer. She reached into her purse and pulled out five thousand dollars. “That was a little unusual,” West recalled.
Later that summer, Lee called again, with a new proposal. His wife, he said, had been “driving around Buckhead, and she came across this amazing modern house and thought it had to be a Scott West house.” She was right. The house, on Randall Mill Road, wasn’t quite finished, and it had not been on the market—but Lee told West that he was already buying it, from the owner, for four and a half million dollars. Now he wanted West to redo the landscaping and the outdoor pool, plus some interior finishes. West took another retainer, but he had other clients to attend to, and Lee grew impatient. Eventually, Lee asked West for his money back and began planning the renovations without him.
The renovations were supervised, as far as the neighbors could tell, by Indiana’s father, Eldridge Bennett, a sturdy man who drove an old Jaguar and wore a pair of dog tags around his neck. Neighbors described him as friendly but hard to pin down. He told one that he worked in the concrete business—and that he’d been on the team that killed Osama bin Laden—but gave another a card that identified him as the marketing manager for an accounting company. This neighbor noticed that a wine tower in the house was being stocked with Moët & Chandon (“thousands of bottles, like, twenty feet tall”) and asked who was paying for it all. Bennett told him that the new owner was in California, “working on music stuff.” Like many residents of Randall Mill Road, this neighbor is white. The Bennetts are Black. “It seemed like they didn’t come from money,” the neighbor said, “but they had sure found a lot of it.”
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
I’m waiting for Paul Mescal at what looks like the mouth of hell. It’s some kind of nightmarish, subterranean space down a backstreet in London’s Soho and, rather than entering it through, say, I don’t know, a door, there is just an open ramp leading down into pitch-black darkness. It’s hard not to imagine that, when you get to the bottom of the slope, you will be greeted by a pit of writhing, agonised souls; and, from some of the pictures I’ve seen ahead of time on TripAdvisor — for it is, indeed, one of those new-fangled, volume-up, lights-off gyms — that seems a reasonable guess.
It makes sense that the 27-year-old Irish actor — breakthrough star of Normal People and already an Oscar nominee — would suggest meeting somewhere like this. He’s less than a week away from flying to Morocco to start filming the long-awaited (23 years and counting!) sequel to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, in which he plays the lead. If you’ve seen the original, and of course you have, you’ll know that as much as he’ll want to make sure that his character, Lucius — the now-grown-up son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), herself the former lover of Maximus (Russell Crowe) and sister of pervy Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), both now deceased — has all the complexities of psychology and motivation in which his confusing upbringing would, no doubt, have resulted, he’ll also want to be… completely ripped.
I’m peering down the ramp a little nervously, wondering if he’s going to emerge from the gloom with his top off, brandishing a trident, or maybe flanked by snarling tigers, when he appears from around the corner, just walking down the street like a regular person, and intro-duces himself in a low-key, friendly way. He’s already done his workout for the day with his trainer, Tim, he says. He apologises for being a few minutes late, but he just bumped into Andrew Haigh — the director of a movie called All of Us Strangers he’s starring in that will be out soon, which, he says, is “a very kind film, but also sad and sexy; like, the perfect trifecta” — and the two of them got to chatting.
Read the rest of this article at: GQ